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Saturday, August 12, 2017

Bolshevism and Marxism

Russia had lagged behind the western nations in the development of
industry and commerce despite Peter the Great’s reforms. The crucial
factors in the Russian Revolution were the low degree of capitalist
development, the role and aspirations of the peasantry, and the
international situation at the time of the Bolshevik coup.

Marx held that under capitalism industrial development would lead to a
direct confrontation of the capitalist class and the working class and
that this would lead to the capture of political power by the working
class. In the light of this we can examine the degree of industrial
development in Russia up to 1917 and the potentialities it held for a
socialist, as opposed to a capitalist revolution.

For it must be
remembered that Russia had not yet experienced a capitalist revolution.
Industry was in fact not developed to any great extent in Russia. Eighty
per cent of the 160 million Russian subjects were peasants. The defeat
in war by Germany had shown how inadequately developed heavy industry
was in Russia, and yet this was almost the only form of industry that
existed in the Tsar’s dominions. The socialisation of production, which
Marx had seen as capitalism’s contribution to Socialism, that is, the
development of industry into increasingly larger productive units,
operated by social labour had hardly occurred in Russia. There were
really only two centres of industry, each far from the other, in St.
Petersburg and in Southern Russia and the Caucaus. The working class and
capitalist class did not yet face each other alone. The social scene
was confused by the peasantry — a mere 80 per cent of the population!

The role and aspiration of the peasantry are crucial in any examination of the nature of the 1917 Revolution.

The peasants were susceptible only to Lenin’s promise of land. Their
aspirations extended no further than that they should have their own
land. When they later protested against state policies on the land, they
were hastily suppressed. Thus one of the mass bases of the revolution
had to be suppressed, for Lenin had climbed to power partly on the backs
of the peasants, when the motive of the peasants were certainly not
socialist.

We have noted that Russia was not “ripe” for Socialism. Marxism holds
that objective and subjective conditions must coincide for a country to
be ready for a socialist revolution. In Russia Lenin could not ask the
people to raise the Bolsheviks to power without renouncing every claim
to being a Marxist. The objective conditions were not ripe, but neither
were the subjective. Had you asked a revolutionary what his views were
about the moneyless, socialist economy which was supposed to be
approaching, he would probably have been unsure as to what you were
talking about.

How, then, did Lenin manage to lead the Bolsheviks to state power in a
situation not suitable for a Marxist party? The simple answer, of
course, would be that Lenin was not truly in the tradition of Marx. The
problem, however, has more to it than just that. The country was in
confusion: food was scarce, as was clothing: the armies were in disarray
on the front in face of German attacks; some army officers under
Kornilov had threatened the Provisional Government which was incapable
of imposing any sort of order.

In the midst of this confusion Lenin
offered the suffering poor a blueprint for planning success that was
brilliant because of its simplicity: Peace, Bread and Land. The way he
proposed to achieve this was by nationalising large private
property (nothing was said about small). The Bolsheviks were the only
group organised well-enough to make any kind of appeal to a
disillusioned populace. The motto of the First International: “the
emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class
itself”, was forgotten.

This motto, and the principle behind it, is important in assessing how
the Bolsheviks behaved from a Marxist point of view. We must also return
to the 1903 London Conference of the Russian Social Democrats. To Marx
“the proletarian movement is an independent movement of the overwhelming majority in the interests of that majority”. Lenin, at the 1903 Conference, had argued for the “revolutionary core” leading
the masses. He was thus separating the working class movement into a
mass-body and a leadership composed of intellectuals. In 1917 Lenin
carried his philosophy of elitism to its logical conclusion but found it
impossible to impose Socialism on an essentially unsocialist populace.

And yet can all these arguments against the material, social and human
possibilities for Socialism in Russia in 1917, be refuted by Marx’s
statement in his Preface to Capital: “one nation can and should
learn from others”? Marx had taken the stand that Russia could shorten
its transition through capitalism if the advanced western nations had
revolutionary working class movements who could imbue the Russian people
with a socialist spirit, and if Russia had its revolution at the same
time as the western nations.

Trotsky, and later Lenin, in their theory
of the imminence of the working class capture of power accepted that the
western working class were about to revolt. Indeed this provided the
only real justification for their taking power in a country surrounded
by capitalist countries. Yet their assessment of the situation was
inaccurate, and in view of the intelligence and shrewdness of Trotsky
and Lenin, perhaps it was deliberately so — perhaps they were, to be
blunt dishonest.

The western working class had joined the national
patriotic front in 1914 and promptly gone to war to kill each other.
Even in the horrors of 1917, they carried on stoutly supporting their
respective governments. Also, the western working class had very small
effect on the Russians. The Russians had certainly not been influenced
by Marxism. Though Lenin had once called the Populists “stinking
carrion” his attitude during 1917 would seem to show that he had learnt a
great deal from these apologists of what he had called “adventurism”
and “pyrotechnics”. Struve might well have been talking of people like
Lenin when he said that only those blinded by “national vanity” could
argue that Russia might take a short cut to Utopia.

Lenin’s 1921 New Economic Policy was merely an admission of a fact that
the Socialist Party of Great Britain and some others had recognised
earlier: Socialism could not be established in Russia at that time; the
working class could not successfully get and hold power until the
conditions were ripe for Socialism, when capitalism was in its most
highly developed form.

This is not to say, of course, that the Bolsheviks were wrong to support
the February Revolution. Progress could only have resulted from the
overthrow of the archaic Tsarism under which the people of Russia had
laboured long. But for the Bolsheviks to wish to take over so soon after
the capitalist revolution had taken place in this decaying, agrarian
empire, was to deny Marxist history.

In his preface to Capital, Marx stated his view:

One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has
got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its
movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the
economic laws of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold
leaps, nor remove by legal enactments the obstacles offered by the
successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten or
lessen the birthpangs.

All that Marx had conceded was a shortening and lessening of the
birthpangs, and even this only within his context of an international
revolution.